


Pretty Eyes Closed

by Shunshin



Series: Suffering KnB Characters [1]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Angst, Cutting, Depression, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Overthinking, References to Depression, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Worth Issues, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24487633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shunshin/pseuds/Shunshin
Summary: Kise thinks that being gone would be nice. No longer living, no longer existing. There would be no need for him to act like the peppy blonde he's known for being. He can just... be nothing.
Relationships: Kasamatsu Yukio/Kise Ryouta
Series: Suffering KnB Characters [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788898
Comments: 11
Kudos: 40





	Pretty Eyes Closed

Kise knows he's not the brightest student.

He's failing all his classes, so it's not exactly rocket science. He's always been told he's stupid by his sisters, his parents, even Kasamatsu-senpai sometimes, although the latter always follows it with a hair ruffle (Is it affectionate? Who could like somebody like Kise?). He's told he's stupid, well, slow, by his teachers in every class. Even in English, his best subject. Not that that counts for anything, since he's failing English like he is at everything else in his life. Even his PE teacher, who praises him for his talent in all sports but also makes jabs at Kise's far-below-average grades during lessons. His classmates always laugh when that happens. Kise tries to study, he really does, but it's so hard to when he can't focus because the stone in his belly just gets bigger and bigger every day, weighing him down and suffocating him.

There. Another thought that didn't make sense. Suffocated by a stone in his stomach? He really is stupid. 

It's one of his most defining characteristics, of course, along with his beauty. He's stupid, but beautiful. The girls all think he's hot and they keep coming to him because of that. He's not hot. He's cold and grey and he feels as though he's drowning half the time. (The other half is dedicated to just plain, simple suffering. It's a reliable method of getting himself to sleep, especially if he can get the tears flowing.) They flock to him and ask—beg—for autographs, for attention, for him to be their boyfriend. He's not even able to be real friends with people, much less be a loving, caring partner in a stable relationship. He's a puppet that he himself controls, that he gives the orders to, in order to maintain the happy facade he's put up in place of his real self. 

Everybody thinks he's friendly, but it’s all a lie. He lies and lies and lies all the time, and it's so easy because he's a good actor, he's a model and if he can't even fake a smile he's not worth anything.

Not that he's worth anything even with that ability, but that's not something he can afford to think about now because he's in class and he doesn't think he would be able to stop himself from crying if he started dwelling on how useless and wasteful his very existence is. 

Why would he cry?

It hurts. But it's the truth, so it hurts in a good way. (Now, if only everybody else could see the real him, the version of him that doesn't deserve to live.)

The teacher is not here, there's nobody here but Kise and his own thoughts, wait, no, the teacher is here. And he's calling on Kise, looking as mocking as usual because he knows that Kise won't be able to answer his question. How can he answer the question when he's so silly and absentminded? He can't. He fails to give the answer, but he does give everybody a bright (if slightly strained) smile. "Sorry, my bad! I was daydreaming again about winning the Inter-High, you know?" The class giggles. Kise exhales in relief, congratulating himself on another escape until he remembers that he's lying and that liars should be punished. 

Oh, the class isn't all fooled. They don't think he's daydreaming about winning the Inter-High. They think he's reliving a hot, steamy night with someone, some girl or maybe some boy on his team, since Kise goes through girlfriends like Murasakibara goes through snacks or how Aomine goes through basketball shoes. He's got a pretty face and he's all touchy-feely with his seniors and everybody he's friends with (even with people he's not friends with), so he's just a slut. He touches and feels people up, he gets it on, he wins. The next day he's tired in class because of the strenuous nighttime activities he's partaken in, which is why he doesn't pay attention and keeps falling asleep during the lesson. He wears makeup to hide the hickies and dark rings from too many consecutive nights of being active. 

Nobody has ever said this to his face, but Kise knows they're all thinking it. If he's thinking it, why wouldn't the rest of the world? He knows himself best, after all.

And he's not just stupid and slutty, he's well aware that he's only good for what he can offer people, which is usually only eye-candy and points in matches. Nobody wants to hang out with him for who he is. He's very careful to make sure the world only sees what he wants them to see, a happy-go-lucky but annoyingly noisy teenage boy who doesn't understand the concept of leaving others alone. Nobody knows the dense sadness that haunts him throughout his day and they never will. It's his problem. It's his pain. He doesn't need to get others involved in his angsty, irrelevant drama—not when it's all internal, anyway. 

Thankfully, break comes soon. Kise doesn't have to keep his head up. He immediately slumps over and rests his forehead on the desk. It's not long before he hears the familiar slide of the classroom doors opening.

"Kise!" Kasamatsu barks, his eyebrows joined in the middle. "Oi, Kise, wake up! I'm treating the team to lunch!"

He must have lost a bet.

Kise shoots up in his seat so fast that his chair tips backwards and he ends up falling along with it. "Ouch! Senpaiiiiiii," he cries, tears forming in the corners of his eyes as he props himself up with one arm. "Why did you scare me like that?" 

Kasamatsu scoffs at him and a few of Kise's classmates laugh. Nobody helps him up. His head is throbbing from meeting the floor so suddenly, but he simply runs his hands through his hair to make sure there isn't any dust there and grins. He's silly, childish Kise, someone who can get up and laugh his mistakes away no matter the severity. Kise has laughed away concussions and broken bones before, blabbering to anybody who would listen, "Ah, I'm so careless! Sorry, senpai, did I fall asleep while walking or something? Eh, I didn't sleep that late, I slept before five! Yes, in the morning, so what? Senpai, you don't have to cry! Please don't cry, senpai, you're going to make me cry tooooooooo..." ("Shut up. I'm not crying, you idiot, you are!")

Annoying, noisy Kise, with a voice too high and a habit of talking too loudly.

"You're really doing that, senpai?" he exclaims disbelievingly. Kasamatsu's face gets a little bit darker. "Senpai's really kind... Hey, I didn't know you had a heart!"

Moriyama guffaws. "He lost a bet. I said I could get that feisty redhead girl's number and he bet I couldn't, so now he's paying for the team's food."

Kise beams. "Well, senpai, I'm going to be doing homework—I'm not lying I swear!—so you don't have to waste money buying food for me, okay? Get yourself something with my share of the money. My condolences."

"It's not a fixed amount of money, he has to buy all of us whatever we want," Moriyama blurts out before Kasamatsu can slap his hand over his mouth. Then Moriyama licks Kasamatsu's hand and that makes Kasamatsu scream at him, distracting them both. Kise manages to slip past them out of the classroom while his teammates make fools of themselves, hands in his pockets like the cool boy he is. 

He's going to have to find somewhere else to sleep, then. 

He shouldn't be this tired, considering he slept at eight last night. Or was it six? Was the eight o' clock bedtime last night or the night before? He can't remember. His memory is terrible. He can never remember what happened when, not that it's surprising. He's too dumb to even remember such small things, after all. And he's not really sleepy, per se, he's just tired and heavy. It's too much effort to move. All he wants to do is to stop moving and stop breathing and just blank out for as long as he can, preferably for the rest of his life. But he can't do that here, in the hallway, so he forces himself to continue walking, putting one foot in front of the other.

It's so hard. So, so hard. He's just so full of sadness and he doesn't want to do anything but stop and—he's been over this. Keep moving, Kise. 

Just keep moving until you're away from anybody who might care.

Who is he kidding? Nobody cares. But common human decency means that people like to stop and ask after someone who doesn't seem alright, even if they are the scum of the earth and don't deserve such care at all. Maybe the rooftop is a good idea. He knows Aomine goes to his school's rooftop every day during his own breaks to nap; Momoi texts him to complain about not being able to find him. Aomine is always at the rooftop, Momoi, learn. And then Kise feels bad for thinking that, because he's in no position to be asking other people to learn.

He bumps into people more than once on the way up, and ends up falling on the stairs and hitting his shins when he misses a step. Yep, that's going to bruise. Kise's happy about it. It's something he can press and feel the pain of to cope with having to face the world. It's something he can hurt himself with. It's a spot of colour in this grey world. 

Yeah, he likes having bruises. Injuries, in general, are one of Kise's favourite things to have.

He falls back onto the hot concrete of the rooftop from too far, misjudging the distance between him and the ground. His shoulders are going to ache for the rest of the day. Hopefully they'll hurt tonight as well, when he's lying in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the frogs and crickets outside. 

He stops breathing until he's forced to, then he stops and starts again, repeating the cycle over and over. Breathing is hard. It takes so much energy. He hates it and he hates being alive. 

It was harder than usual to roll himself out of bed today. His mornings always start the same way. He wakes to his alarm at four, gives himself time to wallow in his sadness (pathetic, he knows) until five or six, then drags himself out of bed to brush his teeth, wash his face, and maybe have a shower if he can manage it. If not, it's fine. All he needs is a little deodorant and he's ready to go. The hardest part of all this is looking for a reason to get out of bed, to not go back to sleep... forever. (Really, there's no point in getting up except to make sure that people don't notice that he's missing. The last thing he wants is to miss practice and end up having Kasamatsu on his ass about it. As the captain, Kasamatsu has his address. Kise doesn't want him to see how much of a mess his room is. He doesn't want Kasamatsu to accidentally see the bloodied tissues in his wastebasket when he's least expecting it. He doesn't want Kasamatsu to see him as anything but the effervescent, cheerful Kise Ryouta.)

School starts at seven thirty. He leaves the house at six thirty, six forty-five latest, so he has enough time to get himself to school. He doesn't live very far from Kaijou, a ten-minute walk away at most, but he has to muster the motivation and energy for every single step there, so he gives himself an hour. 

When recess is over, he remains on the rooftop. The sound of the bell is at the very edge of his consciousness, so he doesn't notice it until the lesson after recess is over. And when he does realise he's now late, he can't be bothered. His teachers don't expect him to learn anything, and neither does he. His whole life is a waste of time. He's just that, a waste. Nothing but a waste.

Waste of space, waste of money, waste of talent. He knows he's talented, yes, but he'd much rather give all of his talent to someone who actually deserves it. 

He misses all the other lessons.

Lunch is a funny thing. Sometimes he feels like eating, but more often than not, he doesn't, even though he never has breakfast. He's just never hungry. He only eats when people are watching or when he knows he's running low on energy and he needs something extra to get him through training. Dinner is also an iffy thing. He can go days without eating, no problem. 

It really isn't a problem. He's really fine. 

He can't spend lunch break on the rooftop, unfortunately, or he'll really miss practice, so he goes and hides in a toilet stall after returning to class to get his things. In his pocket there's a penknife and his middle school badge. (It says Teikou in black on a white background, covered in enamel or something that makes it hard and glossy.) Then he shimmies down his pants and starts cutting at his hip, in between the lines from previous cuts and the still-healing pink-red ones from yesterday. He doesn't stop at just one cut, going on until he feels like he might bleed out. An exaggeration, of course, since the cuts are not deep and there aren't really that many. He's taken his pants off completely to avoid getting them stained and has dumped them on the closed toilet seat. The stalls all come with their own toilet paper dispenser so he can use that to soak up the blood that drips out of the new wounds. 

When he's satisfied with the damage he's inflicted on himself, he cleans off the penknife and lifts the toilet cover to throw the now-red toilet paper in. He takes the Teikou pin out of his pocket, nearly dropping it when he tries to hold both it and the penknife in one hand and keep the penknife. His hand goes to yesterday's cuts and he scores each one a few times with the pin, letting the pin get under the surface of his skin. It's not very sharp, but if he presses hard enough and runs it along the pink lines enough times he can feel the pain. Soon his whole hip will become oversensitive and he won't feel like hurting himself any more. Cutting on oversensitive skin is not fun.

He puts pressure on the cuts (fresh and freshly reopened) until they stop bleeding and then he's off to practice. He brought the gauze and tape in with him, so now he slaps that on to make sure he doesn't bleed onto his shorts later on.

Then he takes a deep breath, composing himself and preparing to fake his way through the rest of the day before leaving the toilet.

"Oi, Kise!" Coach shouts. "You're our ace! If you can't do this, what does that mean for the team?"

They are practising dribbling. Or, in Kise's case, failing to dribble. Dribbling the ball while manoeuvring around cones is a very simple exercise that nobody but beginners should be having trouble with, but Kise's hip hurts and he can't concentrate, for some reason. He's so sad. He's just... so sad. And tired. He's exhausted of the world, he's done with living, but he's still here and he can't escape. 

He's here, but at the same time, he isn't. It's a terrible feeling. 

"Kise!" Now Kasamatsu is yelling at him as well. "Wake up! What if this was a real match?"

They would lose, and it would be all his fault. 

"I'm sorry, senpai," he mumbles, looking down at the ball, which he's dropped onto the shiny wooden floor. Everything is hot and bright. His eyes are hot and the lights are blinding, overwhelmingly white and yellow. 

"Don't be sorry, be better!" Kasamatsu barks at him. "Oi, brat, look at me."

Kise looks up into Kasamatsu's piercing blue eyes, and his senior must see something he doesn't want to see in Kise's slightly crumpled expression because he softens just a little and offers, "Do you want to take a break? Come with me, let's go get drinks for the team."

Kise follows Kasamatsu wordlessly, hot shame rising inside his body. No doubt Kasamatsu-senpai wants to have a stern talk with him away from the others because he doesn't want to embarrass Kise. It's nice of him, but Kise doesn't deserve such special treatment. He should be humiliated. Not being able to dribble as one of the Miracles was terrible, to say the least. 

"I'll get straight to the point," Kasamatsu says when they reach the vending machine. He takes out his phone and scrolls through the basketball group chat for the list of drinks everybody likes, then starts to key the numbers in. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Everything is fine, senpai. Why?" Kise gives Kasamatsu a smaller version of his model smile, acting a little like his usual sweet self. 

Kasamatsu levels a heavy gaze on him. "I'm not blind, you idiot. I can see that you're not fine at all."

Kise pouts. "Senpaiiiiiii, what are you talking about? I'm fine, see?" He grins.

Kasamatsu sighs. "Stop it. You don't have to hide around me." He turns off his phone and puts it on the bench beside the vending machine, then puts a hand on Kise's shoulder. "You're a good player and a good person. I've seen how kind you can be, and your basketball is not the worst. Far from it. It's very good." Kise gulps. He's not a good person, not at all. Kasamatsu-senpai just never sees that side of him, the bad side.

"So why do you hate yourself so much?"

"S-senpai?"

Kasamatsu's gaze flicks toward the elastic waistband of Kise's shorts. "Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, Kise. You're my kouhai and even though it may not seem so, I care about you."

He shouldn't. Kasamatsu-senpai cares too much about people. Kise's not unaware of the way his captain cries after they lose a match, no matter how hard Kasamatsu tries to keep it a secret. He doesn't let anyone be there for him. 

"I do feel a bit unwell," Kise admits. He feels very unwell, but not physically. But if saying something will get Kasamatsu-senpai to leave him alone, he'll do it. "Can I go home early?"

Kasamatsu appraises him, then nods. "Fine. I'll tell Coach. Go home and get some rest."

So Kise gets his things and tells everybody that he's just feeling a little under the weather and that he'll be fine once he gets some rest. 

He can't be bothered to shower when he gets home. It's not like he was sweating a lot during training, since he was useless and didn't do much. He's so tired, he wants to sleep but he lies on his bed staring into space, unable to fall asleep for some reason. And does he really deserve to clean himself? He's filth on the inside, so it makes sense that he would be filthy on the outside, too. It would be a waste of water and electricity. 

But the cuts. He should clean them. 

No. He won't bother. He'll be fine. And if they get infected, fantastic; he'll only have to hide it until he gets a blood infection, then he can finally get the suffering he deserves. It sounds stupid, but he really wants… he really wants the pain. 

He's just so sad. He hates himself, Kasamatsu-senpai was right, he hates himself and he wants himself gone. He wants to remove himself from this world and disappear. To vanish, like Kurokocchi, but completely. 

There isn't anything in this world for him and there isn't anybody who needs him. His family will be fine—better off—without him draining their resources with makeup and bandages and his parents and sisters will never need to be angry with him again. One less reason for them to get angry or frustrated. It'll be easier for all of them. 

Kise wants to sleep forever. 

He closes his eyes.


End file.
